To be honest, with the right VSTs and a back-up wave editor, there's very, very little you can't do in FL studiio, if you're only gonna use it for studio composition. Back it up with a decent wave editor like Audacity, paired with a soundblaster card for sampling, get a good glitch filter and you can do pretty much anything. It's only when it comes to hooking in external instruments or trying to direct live play that the program is seriously weak, in which case Reason will do you. I think the general antipathy towards FL Studio is based on three things, 1) it's dumb original name 2) the fact that its interface seems overly siimplistic compared to most other music production software, especially to someone used to using real electronic instruments and 3) a lot of very bad music is produced with it by people who wouldn't know a good baseline if it kicked their door in at 3 AM and told them it was their real father. This last fact is probably because it is actually remarkably simple to learn. In my opinion, once you master the automation cliips and piano roll it becomes quite a powerful sequencer. Its only real inbuilt limitation is that you can't change time signatures in the middle of a track, but considering a lot of high-end hardware is basically locked in to variations on 4/4 anyway that's hardly a major issue. It's also guff for playing live and its recording function is pretty crap, though if you hook it into Reason as an instrument this problem goes away.